Final Thoughts – DOUBLE DECKER! Doug & Kirill

It’s fun, but not especially memorable.

Ultimately, it seems like Double Decker is stuck between wanting to be two different shows with much, much better productions – Cowboy Bebop, and Blood Blockade Battlefront – and it does manage to get some of the fun out of both of them, but doesn’t really get the nuance of either.

Let’s start with that production, though. As I mentioned before, the art design is very cool for a setting that could be easiest described as “Westpunk New York”, but fairly often we end up going somewhere utterly normal looking and it just winds up reminding you that the rest of the show looks middling at best, and the more I watched, the more I grew to loathe the character designs, which look like Yu-Gi-Oh! 5D’s reject concept art, and – hot take here – the fact that the MacGuffins looks like Tide Pods just ends up making me unable to take them seriously.

The other thing robbing them of narrative strength is the fact that for all the harm they supposedly do, very rarely do the monstrous transformations caused by overuse of Anthem actually stick. Almost every time, we see the Villain of the Week looking totally normal again as they’re placed under arrest despite just going through Parasite Eve mutations, and while I understand that this is meant to be in keeping with the lighthearted tone of the show, it doesn’t really jive with the world of the story.

The cast isn’t much better by the three-quarter mark, either – the only character I’m likely to remember at all is Kirill, who admirably is not just a try-hard prodigy of police work, but an idiot who more or less lucked into the job and is instantly made the Team Butt Monkey. Aside from Doug (because his name is in the title) I don’t even remember anyone else’s name, though I can recall the garish character designs.

I was really hoping for more development by the end of Episode 10 but not much of substance has happened thus far and I’m not really invested enough to see what happens in the ramp-up to the climax, because I don’t think it’ll be anything particularly spectacular. It’s a shame, as an original Sunrise production, this one just needed a little more thought (and money) put into it and it could have been one of the better shows this season.

As it stands, I dropped it after ten episodes. 5/10.

Final Thoughts – Zombie Land Saga

A great show, maybe not a great idol show.

By now, pretty much anyone in the know about anime has heard about or seen Zombie Land Saga, particularly the big twist from the eighth episode that reminded me that there are indeed still shitty people in this fandom, but the fact is that it was a very, very good show and a great takedown of the genre that managed to lean in just enough to still have a great story to it. Saga is, very often, riotously funny, particularly any scene involving our new reigning Queen of Memes Tae Yamada.

And carrying easily the most diverse cast I’ve ever seen in an idol show (being that they aren’t all just really gorgeous women who go to the same school or something) works brilliantly in its favor, allowing Saga to lampoon biker flicks, 8 Mile, geisha stories, and more in the span of just twelve episodes.

In fact, my only problem with it is that they put very little effort into the thing that defines the genre, the actual performances themselves. I know MAPPA can do better than this, because even if the choreography is fine, the performances are almost all rendered in eye-bleedingly terrible CG that looks worse the more characters are onscreen, like the rendering machine had a crappy graphics card or something. It’s really, really a shame that the show’s most climactic moments are robbed of a lot of their impact by a recurring problem with the production that they really didn’t bother trying harder on – in the first half, we see the same performance twice, and despite likely already having all the render data for it, it still looks just as bad the second time when they had a chance to improve it the second time. I can’t help but remember how completely captivating the first skate routine in episode one of Yuri On Ice!! was two years ago and wondering what went wrong here.

So yeah, come for terrific comedy and a great cast (including Mamoru Miyano as…himself), but go watch Love Live! Sunshine! or The iDOLM@STER afterwards to see how this should have looked.

8/10.

Final Thoughts – Boarding School Juliet

Decent execution for a decent show.

Boarding School Juliet seems more like a High School AU of West Side Story than an adaptation of its namesake, but I’m always down for a well-executed romcom with a solid twist, and the idea that the two of them are leaders of rival houses that operate more like gangs is an appealing one that gets a lot of solid traction.

While I still consider the first episode the strongest, Boarding School Juliet had fairly consistent writing across the board with the cast acting reasonably and rationally, even if the details of the story don’t really match up at all – Inuzuka may be far, far more likeable than the original Romeo but his badassery is a pretty big change to the character and he’s got an older brother and a childhood friend attached to him, just for starters. Romeo and Juliet are a pretty decent shorthand for a pair of star-crossed lovers at this point but I’d really like to see this coding die out if it’s going to be used in name only.

That being said, it has the misfortune of being aired next to the best romance I saw all year – Rascal Does Not Dream of Bunny Girl Senpai – and in comparison it comes out looking very standard. The production was easily the best in the first episode and was just ‘good’ for the remainder of the show, and the side cast and main love interest are very well-worn tropes at this point that don’t have a lot of nuance to them, though I do like that tsundere Juliet defrosts over the course of the story and naturally progresses into being more openly loving towards Romio, given how often we see really static tsundere-type characters now. The story also gets to a pretty satisfying endpoint – it’s clear the plot isn’t over, but this does feel like a natural stopping point and I would walk away satisfied even without a second season.

All in all, not an amazing show but one that I would happily recommend to the Ouran set, at the very least. 7/10.

Final Thoughts – Goblin Slayer

Honestly, I haven’t watched or had an inclination to watch any more of this.

I stopped after six episodes as that’s my usual standard for writing an Update, and after one of you guys told me that it was, in fact, just going to be a wish fulfillment bloodfest where the title character never has to face consequences for being a murderous psychopath, I instantly lost all interest in it, because we already have lots of those. The side characters are mildly interesting but nothing I haven’t seen before, and I’ve yet to hear a single positive opinion on how the whole thing turned out, so…yeah, dropped after six episodes. It’s still not the worst thing I’ve ever seen but I don’t have the time or motivation to go back and finish it.

5/10, if only for its looks.

Final Thoughts – Rascal Does Not Dream of Bunny Girl Senpai

One of my favorites of the season, stopped just short of really being great.

Bunny Girl Senpai takes a very literal look at how it feels to be a teenager, as teenage problems begin to manifest themselves in the real world and break the laws of the universe.

I’m very, very impressed by the execution of this concept, because it falls into almost none of the traps I’d expect from a show that only really has one male character surrounded by lots of girls – not only is Sakuta’s relationship with his girlfriend established early enough to effectively kill a harem, but the rest of the female cast have absolutely no romantic feelings towards him, and they’re already connected to him or his friends somehow. The writing in this show is honestly masterful – every single important concept is set up at least a full episode before it becomes plot-critical, the characters remain consistent and there are no stupid romcom lewd misunderstandings. Everyone leans towards acting like sane, rational people and it makes it a million times easier to get invested in the drama, because all of it comes from a place of realness – it reminds me a lot of Tsukigakirei with a little more fantasy thrown in.

Oh, and of course there are the unavoidable comparisons to Oregairu and Bakemonogatari.

I’ve already praised it a lot in my previous write-ups, but I want to temper expectations, because there’s one thing Tsukigakirei had over Bunny Girl Senpai, and that’s a satisfying ending. While Bunny Girl’s isn’t bad enough to taint the entire experience and I didn’t foresee it the way I did After the Rain’s, it does come very abruptly after an emotional climax and cut the end of the last arc very short. It was a bit of a sour note on top of what otherwise would have easily been a Hall of Fame show, but as it is, I still enjoyed Bunny Girl Senpai enough to happily award it an 8/10.

Final Thoughts – Skull-face Bookseller Honda-san

So good it makes me cry a little.

I often say that the work comedy genre works better in condensed form like this, and Honda-san proves me right more than any other example thus far. It doesn’t give much room for jokes to go on for too long, and it doesn’t wear out its welcome.

And what comes out on the other end is a perfectly distilled comedy with little extra fat and a lot of great jokes. While American bookstores certainly don’t operate in quite the same way (having each bookseller be in charge of a specific section is a pipe dream in the U.S. and is both encouraged by the company and discouraged by management), a lot of the humor is handled the same way, and it’s always nice to see a work-com focus on retail (most of them are restaurant-focused), as I feel like it conveys a pretty good sense of what it’s like to be behind the counter.

But the jokes being good isn’t that surprising – in a season that saw the long-awaited return of Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure, Honda-san managed to be the biggest meme generator of the fall – I’d actually like to focus on the strengths of the production. Skull-face Bookseller Honda-san takes strong advantage of its minimalist art style by exaggerating visual emotions on the characters’ expressionless faces, but even without that, the voice work is strong enough that you can almost see the expressions anyway. The faces don’t change much, but based on the way Honda speaks, you could swear that skull is smiling, or exhausted, or scared. It’s incredibly impressive in a show created on such a small budget and demonstrates how much passion was put into it.

So…aside from one or two gags I didn’t find particularly entertaining, I have no complaints and no problems heavily recommending this one, particularly if you do enjoy books or work in a retail space.

9/10!

Final Thoughts – After the Rain

Yeah, yeah, I know, Winter 2018 show, but it was the most notable one I hadn’t covered yet.

From Wit Studio and the director of a lot of Doraemon projects (and also Mysterious Girlfriend X, apparently) comes the story of a high school girl whose track career was put dramatically on hold by a sudden injury that leaves her with a lot of free time and not a lot of friends, so she fills that void with a new part-time job…and a massive crush on her middle-aged manager. Ultimately it’s a lot more nuanced than that – there are many implications that her father isn’t in her life, the manager is divorced with a son he doesn’t see as often as he wants to, and our heroine Akira is not the loner she thinks she is, having very close friends that she essentially abandoned for this part-time job and an obsession with a man thirty years older than her – and it’s nice to see that the show does not intend to let Akira go unpunished for her behavior. This concept is ripe for exploitation and it gets very little, being that manager Kondo is rightfully confused about the entire situation and is now faced with the problem of letting this teenager off without completely destroying her fragile emotional state.

I wanted to like this so much more than I did, though, because it doesn’t quite commit by the end to a resolution. It leaves things very up in the air by only really resolving one plot thread. While we do get what is definitely meant to be an emotional climax, it feels too ambiguous to really hit home the way that it should, and the ramp-up to it is underwhelming, and if you’re going for straight drama the way After the Rain is, it’s really important to make your climax feel like one. This issue might be a problem with the source material – it seems like After the Rain is intended to be a complete adaptation, but with ten volumes of material and only thirteen episodes, it was inevitable that it felt rushed. (That being said, if it does diverge from the manga I don’t know yet, as only the first two volumes have been published in the U.S. thus far.)

As it is, though, it is still enjoyable drama, but it’s hampered from being great by its lack of a meaningful conclusion. The production work (and direction, for that matter) are both certainly up to the standards of Wit Studio, but the story feels unfinished – like they got about 90% of the way there and called it a day, so that a continuation is unlikely since all that’s left is the very end of the story and unlike, say, Working!, it doesn’t seem like we’ll get the last part.

7/10.

Final Thoughts – Children of the Whales

This show is so confused, I don’t know where to begin.

I should stress that I’m not confused about the plot or anything, it’s mostly easy to follow, but Children of the Whales is a very beautiful show with a strong aesthetic and a lot of good ideas that seems to want to be too many things at the same time and throws far too many characters at the viewer without many of them getting a chance to make an impression.

It seems to be going for an epic story about a civilization on the brink, but it also doesn’t do a very good job of impressing that idea upon the audience. It’s honestly a difficult show to talk about because there isn’t any one bad thing to point towards, and the show itself isn’t awful, it’s just not very interesting beyond the visuals. Even something like Forest of Piano was able to get me more invested than this, and it’s frustrating because there are interesting things happening in the story that translate into dull, samey bores on the screen.

I think the problem is that Children of the Whales is just not a story that should have been adapted in the first place. Someday I’ll probably write a script about unadaptable media, but for now, I’m gonna tie off this rambling post and move on.

Final score: 5/10. Dropped after five episodes.

Final Thoughts – Lost Song

What a weird show.

Lost Song, for its first half, is a pretty enjoyable if not particularly original JRPG story where magic is performed by select individuals who can use the power of song to heal others and harness the elements. It almost reminds me of a Tales story, especially since in the second half, the tone shifts enormously and becomes a lot more mind-screwy, and it all wraps up in a messy, epic, enjoyable finale that doesn’t make a ton of sense but manages to be pretty thrilling anyway.

An original story brought to you by LIDENFILMS and first-time director team(? I think they’re two people, I can’t find a consistent listing) Junpei & Morita (whose only other credit is series composition on Occultic;Nine, interestingly), Lost Song appears to be almost entirely Morita’s vision, given that he is personally given most of the important credits. Luckily Lost Song manages to look decent if not spectacular, though the dynamic lighting usually works well in its favor, and the abundance of sky shots look beautiful, though the design isn’t going to turn any heads. The music is also relatively average, with the exception of the in-universe singing, which sounds excellent, especially on the part of debut actress Konomi Suzuki as Rin. That being said, I did switch to the dub halfway through, and wound up enjoying it due to the fact that Yukari Tamura seems very miscast as Finis, taking her airheaded aspects and playing them up in her performance of a character that is given a great amount of importance in the story. Melissa Fahn winds up sounding a lot better in comparison. Thankfully, Netflix didn’t dub the music or anything, so I got to enjoy Suzuki’s vocal performance anyway.

This is the best middle-card Netflix show I’ve seen yet, and I’m curious to see what the already announced “new project” might be, though we’ll have to wait until February for more information on that. I’m not really sure where it goes from here aside from a few easy predictions, but I’m excited to see more.

Final Score: 7/10

Final Thoughts – Back Street Girls -GOKUDOLS-

What on Earth were the licensing people smoking?

I would understand if Crunchyroll got this one, because they literally try to license everything, but I’m truly baffled over why Netflix would selectively license a show with such an offensive concept. For those who don’t know, Back Street Girls is about three Yakuza men who are forced on a whim by their boss to undergo sex reassignment surgery into teenage-looking girls in order to become idols.

You read that right.

Particularly with the current political climate surrounding trans people in the U.S., this show is a complete P.R. nightmare to release. It’s trying to be a comedy, but I was so disgusted by the concept that nothing was funny at all, because what kind of fucked-up person still tries to pass this off as a joke?

And what in the seven hells is Chiaki Kon doing directing this? This is the woman who directed Higurashi no Naku Koro Ni, and I have to imagine she was desperate for work or something, because Back Street Girls also looks like garbage.

I refuse to give this any more of my time.

Final Score: 2/10.